Thread by @LaurentMT

Time for a little story #BitcoinTales

An ancient legend (ok, it isn't really ancient considering that I just invented it) says that a giant white whale lives in the depths of the Bitcoin blockchain. If you're able to find it and if you feed it with "dirty" coins, it will give you "clean" coins.

Obviously, this superstition doesn't make a lot of sense considering that the concept of "dirty" coins itself doesn't make any sense. Well, people like fairy tales.

You may think that it's a really stupid story but that would be a mistake because the White Whale is well alive and it's stronger than ever.

Here's one of its appearances in 2017-2018 (more than 2M txs)

And here's it's current trail (more than 1M txs, 200k tx/month).

Here, we can see Moby Dick being fed on March 2018 with bitcoins coming from the Bitfinex hack.
(interactive viz: oxt.me/bookmark/5c73d…)

And here, we can see Moby Dick being fed on April 2018 with bitcoins coming from Quadriga cold wallet.
(interactive viz: oxt.me/bookmark/5c740…)

In a nutshell, the White Whale leaves a clear fingerprint with long chains of txs splitting coins into utxos which are later aggregated in multiple stages.

I suspect that these 2 wallets are just a part of a larger set of wallets. I also suspect that this activity is what many people have described as spam of the blockchain in 2017 and 2018.

Remains the question: What is Moby Dick?
- An exchange? (which one?)
- A mixer? (which one?)
Suggestions are welcome.

FWIW, someone recently suggested on OXT that one of these wallets is a bitcoin doubler but I seriously doubt that it's the case. If I'm wrong, I'm going to launch a bitcoin doubler asap. ☺️

And here's what looks like a third appearance of the White Whale (+2M txs with similar patterns).